Archives for October, 2009

The Center for Inquiry has started a campaign to get a “non-discrimination” provision that could very well require insurance companies to cover “alternative” medical treatments like faith healing taken out of the health care reform bills working their way through Congress. . If the health care bills in Congress pass as they are currently written,…

From Newsweek: Buoyed by $1.9 billion in government funding since 1997 ($1.5 billion of that federal money), abstinence-only education grew from a niche market to a booming industry, with hundreds of curriculums for teachers to choose from. But if the 2000s were abstinence’s boom years, the next decade may well be its bust. With Obama’s…

I’m sure you’ve heard by now about George W. Bush’s $100,000 motivational speech the other day. That’s more than $3500 a minute. Am I the only one who sees “George Bush: Motivational Speaker” and thinks “Paul Blartz: Mall Cop”? Heck, the hundred grand is peanuts. Wait till he starts getting in some of that Rev.…

The Corunna board of education in Michigan has just stepped into a major First Amendment problem with a rash decision to remove a poster put up by the Diversity Club. The poster in question was nothing more than pictures of nine prominent gay people from sports, politics and entertainment. The Corunna Board of Education voted…

I’ve had several people mention Newt Gingrich as a GOP candidate for president in 2012 and I’ve scoffed at the idea. Isn’t gonna happen. Christopher Orr seems to have been reading my mind: Look, anyone who imagines that New Gingrich is going to make a serious bid for the presidency in 2012 is nuts. (The…

The Human Rights Campaign has its latest Corporate Equality Index out and the progress continues. This year, 305 corporations get a 100% score on equality for gays and lesbians, up from 260 last year and 195 the year before. This is great news to everyone except the anti-gay bigots, of course. The Worldnutdaily has an…

Halloween is my favorite holiday of the year. It’s also one that the serious wingnuts go crazy about – which may well be why it’s my favorite holiday. The CBN website has one of the funniest anti-Halloween screeds I’ve ever seen from a “prophet” named Kimberly Daniels (seriously, her bio actually says she is a…

Julian Sanchez absolutely nails the pattern of the last nine months: We know the rules by now, the strange conventions and stilted Kabuki scripts that govern our cartoon facsimile of a national security debate. The Obama administration makes vague, reassuring noises about constraining executive power and protecting civil liberties, but then merrily adopts whatever appalling…

Cop drives drunk, kills two people and leaves the scene of the accident. His fellow officers, beset with compassion for the victims, organize a fundraiser. For the cop who did it. Chicago police officers are planning a benefit this weekend at their union headquarters for Joseph Frugoli, who is accused of crashing into a car…

This is likely bad news. My colleague Daphne Eviatar reports that the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has agreed to hear an en banc appeal of their ruling that rejected the Obama administration’s invocation of the broadest possible meaning of the state secrets privilege. The case is Mohamed et al v Jeppesen Dataplan, a civil…